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Uber lost more than $5 billion dollars in the second quarter of the year. This is the latest in a long series of bad quarters for the ride-hailing company, which also lost over a billion dollars during the first three months of this year. That brings 2019's losses to over $6.2 billion, for those keeping score.

Despite losing so much money between April and June, Uber's investor report is upbeat about an increase in bookings (up 31%), active users (up 30%), trips (up 35%), and revenue (up 14%). These figures do make one wonder if an uptick in business will just exacerbate the bleeding, however. There's yet to be any real evidence that Uber's business model will ever do anything other than burn investors' money to make traffic worse.

Uber says that its cash and cash equivalents for Q2 were a healthy $13.7 billion, $8 billion of which came from its IPO in May.

Does anybody ever tune into the earnings call for Uber? Surely at some point their path to profitability comes up? How unprofitable is the core ride sharing business? How much money is being spent on future endeavors (self driving)? I highly doubt this is the case, but it's not nearly as bad if 5B was spent on self driving this quarter (extreme example, I highly doubt it was anywhere even remotely near that?). How did they go from losing 1B to 5B in one quarter?

I don't see Uber as two years away from solving the self driving taxi. Hard to see them not needing to raise more money at some point.

Wow, I was amazed to see people buy that IPO. Now I am amazed to see it continue spiraling down the toilet at such an amazing rate.I have to wonder what share holders feel when they hear this stuff? $5 Billion dollars. Amazing.

Uber says that its cash and cash equivalents for Q2 were a healthy $13.7 billion, $8 billion of which came from its IPO in May.

So... at this rate, they’re going to burn through their entire IPO haul in less than two quarters?

All those folks saying they wish Uber would go out of business are about to be happy.

Nah, they'll just switch gears, so to speak.

Instead of firing all of the drivers and replacing them with autonomous cars (which, as we have seen, doesn't work so well), Uber will simply fire everybody else and replace them with Windows 95 and Clippy.

Yes, losing money per ride but making up in volume works out to absolutely insane losses per quarter. I mean maybe there's a reason I'm not an "investor", but damn this feels like throwing good money after bad at this point.

Wow, I was amazed to see people buy that IPO. Now I am amazed to see it continue spiraling down the toilet at such an amazing rate.I have to wonder what share holders feel when they hear this stuff? $5 Billion dollars. Amazing.

Considering that Uber shares dropped 11% in after hours trading? Not good.

If units sold (trips) goes up, and revenue doesn’t go up by a similar amount, that’s never a good sign. Similarly, and increase in users with a lesser increase in revenue is also not a good sign.

My interpretation is this:* newer users are taking fewer trips and shorter trips* older users may be taking slightly fewer trips, or are price shopping services* price per trip is falling, even though it didn’t cover the cost of service before the drop, so growth is unsustainable.

Great mind share (even though I personally think they’re a despicable company and will never so business with them), but like companies in the dot-com bubble, mind share doesn’t pay bills.

I may have no idea how company finance works, but a company that has no real infrastructure (no manufacturing plants, no massive office based workforce), a workforce only paid for the work they do has never made any money and is currently losing money at the rate of $20 billion a year. I really can't see how it can still be functioning and why the fraud squad have not raided them to see where they are spending all that money.

Joining in on the “But how!?” chorus. I have no business knowledge, but how can they lose money on each ride when they aren’t paying for the cost of the ride? What is their overhead? Where is the money going? All they need are servers, a handful of actual employees, and the insurance, right? They don’t pay the drivers, the customer does, and they take a cut. They don’t pay for the car maintenance, they don’t pay for the gas...

Uber says that its cash and cash equivalents for Q2 were a healthy $13.7 billion, $8 billion of which came from its IPO in May.

So... at this rate, they’re going to burn through their entire IPO haul in less than two quarters?

All those folks saying they wish Uber would go out of business are about to be happy.

So, what did Uber acomplished so far? - Burned venture capitalist money- Increased trafic- Strangled the Taxi industry- Removed a lot of people from actively searching jobs to driving 10h/day to get something close to basic income.- Made a bunch of people buy expensive cars with the promisse they'd cost "minus whatever" per month- filled Travis Kalanick pockets with money

It seems like their legacy app dev, server maintenance and management over those should not be losing anything like that.

Exactly my question. Amazon went many years losing money, mainly because they were building a huge network of distribution centers. At least they could tell investors that the money was coming eventually (which it did). Unless this is all costs associated with getting autonomous cars up and running, I can't imagine there's a bunch of "start up" costs that they're still working through. They're not going to wring out $5 billion/quarter of cost savings from app optimization.

It seems like their legacy app dev, server maintenance and management over those should not be losing anything like that.

That's what I'm wondering too, where is all the revenue going?

Or are they literally paying drivers more than the revenue that they generate, losing money on each and every trip?

If Uber is unprofitable even while exploiting drivers and paying them poorly, then it just proves how important self-driving cars will be. Many people by now are used to cheap rides, so if Uber can't provide them, autonomous taxis will have a huge market.

I may have no idea how company finance works, but a company that has no real infrastructure (no manufacturing plants, no massive office based workforce), a workforce only paid for the work they do has never made any money and is currently losing money at the rate of $20 billion a year.

This is the thing that boggles me. They avoided the cost of vehicle fleets or maintenance, their biggest labor costs are in the form of independent contractors subject to shitty rates and confidential arbitration... their business model is built on abusing gaps in regulations to operate cheaply, how the fuck can they lose this much money?

Joining in on the “But how!?” chorus. I have no business knowledge, but how can they lose money on each ride when they aren’t paying for the cost of the ride? What is their overhead? Where is the money going? All they need are servers, a handful of actual employees, and the insurance, right? They don’t pay the drivers, the customer does, and they take a cut. They don’t pay for the car maintenance, they don’t pay for the gas...

Strippers.

Cocaine and strippers.

They're also pouring a dizzying amount of money into the autonomous vehicle program. It's a desperate race to get those operational so they can fire all the human drivers, but it seems unlikely they'll be able to finish it soon enough.

I may have no idea how company finance works, but a company that has no real infrastructure (no manufacturing plants, no massive office based workforce), a workforce only paid for the work they do has never made any money and is currently losing money at the rate of $20 billion a year. I really can't see how it can still be functioning and why the fraud squad have not raided them to see where they are spending all that money.

Pyramids and busting bubbles spring to mind.

They should have been raided in the early days under RICO. They are literally one of the few times a business model meets the requirements for racketeering charges. They organized explicitly to operate unlicensed taxis.

And their food delivery probably violates health codes in many municipalities.

But hey, "on a computer" and "over the internet" are magic words that make the law no longer apply.

Joining in on the “But how!?” chorus. I have no business knowledge, but how can they lose money on each ride when they aren’t paying for the cost of the ride? What is their overhead? Where is the money going? All they need are servers, a handful of actual employees, and the insurance, right? They don’t pay the drivers, the customer does, and they take a cut. They don’t pay for the car maintenance, they don’t pay for the gas...

They have 22,000 employees worldwide, of which 11,000 are in the US. Aside from the "losing money on every trip" which is probably true, money goes to customer support for 99 million customers. There are local teams who handle regulations in every market they move into, and develop relations with restaurants that do Uber Eats.

On would think that Uber would be smarter in dropping all development of AV's and leasing them than trying to make their own. The capital costs there have to be a good part of that drain, since it generates zero revenue. I'd hazard to guess a lot of their expenditures also generate zero revenue.

I figure a lot of the issues probably have to do with IPO costs, but it would be nice to see their books to find out what other wounds they're bleeding from.

I know that everyone seems to enjoy piling on Uber, because, in all respects, they are a terrible company.

However, one thing that has been noticed at cities across the US is that DUIs have dropped significantly since Uber/Lyft started operating in those areas. The ease of use (ie. use app, get assigned car + driver, see exactly when it will arrive, etc), and avoiding the hassle of trying to wave down a taxi has significantly made our roads safer.

On would think that Uber would be smarter in dropping all development of AV's and leasing them than trying to make their own. The capital costs there have to be a good part of that drain, since it generates zero revenue. I'd hazard to guess a lot of their expenditures also generate zero revenue.

I figure a lot of the issues probably have to do with IPO costs, but it would be nice to see their books to find out what other wounds they're bleeding from.

I mean, if business is up that much, how are they still losing money?

The problem is that other than a brand, the concept of Uber's business model is easy to replicate and not really protected.

The reason other people can't easily compete is mind/market share and startup costs, but if you already build autonomous vehicles, what benefit does Uber really have over doing it yourself or working with another startup if the driver side marketshare is no longer relevant because there are no drivers?

The problem with Uber is that they only have a business model while drivers are required, and when they aren't needed neither is Uber as a specific product/company. That's why they are working on AVs, because it's the only future they can have if they make vehicles.

I may have no idea how company finance works, but a company that has no real infrastructure (no manufacturing plants, no massive office based workforce), a workforce only paid for the work they do has never made any money and is currently losing money at the rate of $20 billion a year.

This is the thing that boggles me. They avoided the cost of vehicle fleets or maintenance, their biggest labor costs are in the form of independent contractors subject to shitty rates and confidential arbitration... their business model is built on abusing gaps in regulations to operate cheaply, how the fuck can they lose this much money?

becuse that indicates something is seriously messed up with their business model, if more than double the utilization increase results in half the revenue increase. Something is serioulsy fcked up. And even more so with the spin doctors, if they think they should point that fact out.

I may have no idea how company finance works, but a company that has no real infrastructure (no manufacturing plants, no massive office based workforce), a workforce only paid for the work they do has never made any money and is currently losing money at the rate of $20 billion a year.

This is the thing that boggles me. They avoided the cost of vehicle fleets or maintenance, their biggest labor costs are in the form of independent contractors subject to shitty rates and confidential arbitration... their business model is built on abusing gaps in regulations to operate cheaply, how the fuck can they lose this much money?

becuse that indicates something is seriously messed up with their business model, if more than double the utilization increase results in half the revenue increase. Something is serioulsy fcked up. And even more so with the spin doctors, if they think they should point that fact out.

Or the growth has been outside the US in places where rides are cheaper. Remember that Uber started in the US so expansion to lower cost countries may result in high activity but lower revenue per user, but associated lower costs/etc.

What are Uber's actual costs? I would have guessed their expenses per ride were pretty small. It's not like they're paying for gas or labor, just taking a cut what somebody else is collecting and moving some data around, right?